Knight Awards $3.2 Million in News Challenge: Data Competition

February 7, 2016

The has announced grants totaling $3.2 million to seventeen projects focused on highlighting data as an essential element in addressing community challenges and creating opportunities for learning and innovation.

Awarded through the , a collaboration between Knight, the and the , the grants will address issues from police misconduct and digital privacy, to expanding access to public benefits, to improving data literacy and making it easier to find and use public information. Eight of the winners will receive investments ranging from $237,589 to $470,000 each, while nine early-stage ideas will receive $35,000 each through the . "The winning projects reveal new ways to shape and deliver information through data — showing how it can be used to build stronger more informed communities, while inviting people to explore and innovate," said John Bracken, Knight's vice president for media innovation.

Winning projects include the at , which was awarded $440,000 to create a crowdsourced resource that documents and visualizes how companies share personal data; , a collaborative effort of the , , and , which will receive $470,000 to train librarians and community members how to find, use, and give advice on the power of open data; and , which was awarded $310,000 to compile, analyze, and release a data set of more than a hundred highway patrol stops across the country.

The Prototype Fund winners include , which will use its grant to create a tool that tracks all major bills passed in New Jersey and provides information about whether the law was enforced and milestones were met; the , which will work to help communities maintain their privacy by building a community-driven open data service to detect cell-phone surveillance and produce high-quality cellular network data for research; and Data Quality Uplift for Government, which will work to improve the quality of government data by creating tools for quality assessment, a scorecard aimed at motivating leaders to invest in data quality, and a quality improvement protocol for local governments.